USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive: USSR

Established in 1994 to preserve the audio-visual histories of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust, the USC Shoah Foundation maintains one of the largest video digital libraries in the world: the Visual History Archive (VHA).

USSR

The Holocaust in the occupied Soviet Union is one of largest subjects in the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive, discussed in over 12,500 interviews that include 7,175 in Russian and 304 in Ukrainian. A major effort was undertaken to record testimonies in the former Soviet Union—including 3,427 interviews in Ukraine, 677 in Russia, and 246 in Belarus—with interviewees who were often still living in the same location as they had before and during the war. Other survivors from this part of the world were interviewed in Israel, the United States, Germany, and elsewhere.

A number of themes are common to interviews describing the Soviet experience:

• General aspects of Soviet life: membership of the Communist Party, participation in the Komsomol and Pioneers; attitudes toward Stalin; life on the collective farms; Stalinist political repressions; Soviet concentration camps; the Soviet political police, including several interviews with people who served in the NKVD.
• Soviet Jewish life: the closure of Jewish schools and synagogues; Jewish religious observance in the USSR; Jews serving in the Soviet army; issues of Jewish and Soviet identity and anti-Semitism in the USSR (the “5th line of the Soviet passport”); the “Anti-cosmopolitan” campaign and the “Doctor’s Plot”; Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Additionally, the Visual History Archive includes a rare collection of interviews with Karaites, Krimchaks, Mountain Jews, and Bukharan Jews.
• The evacuation and flight of civilians in the wake of the Axis invasion of June 22, 1941.
• Mass shootings both large (such as at Babi Yar in Kyiv) and small (numerous massacres conducted in rural locations); executions using gas vans; subsequent Nazi efforts to cover up traces of mass killings, e.g. as conducted by Sonderkommando 1005 units.
• The establishment of ghettos and camps in the occupied Soviet Union: in some cases, these ghettos and camps are very obscure and Visual History Archive testimonies may be some of the only sources that confirm their existence.
• The partisan movement: the archive has a large body of information on a great number of resistance groups (including Jewish partisans units), the individuals connected to them, their operations, structure, organization, rules, and so on.
• Soviet POWs: the archive contains a number of interviews of Soviet-Jewish prisoners of war who hid their Jewish identity to survive.
• Ostarbeiter: the archive contains a number of interviews of Soviet-Jewish civilians who concealed their Jewish identity and were deported to Germany with other Ukrainians, Poles, Belorussians, and Russians.
• Transnistria: the archive has around 3,500 testimonies that relate to Transnistria—the area of southwestern Ukraine between the rivers Dniester and Bug that was under Romanian control between 1941 and 1944. Subjects discussed include the deportation of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina to Transnistria; the establishment of ghettos, camps and colonies; conditions under the Romanians; relations between the local Jews and the deportees; and the operation to rescue Jewish orphans from Transnistria organized by the Jewish communities in Bucharest and Palestine.
• Post-liberation and return home: filtration camps; the treatment of Soviet citizens who had been under German occupation during the war; and the non-recognition by Soviet authorities of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust.

Erenburg, Ilʹia; Grossman, Vasilii. The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland during the War of 1941-1945, New York: Holocaust Publications, 1981.